Two essays on the stakes, the scholarship, the key arguments, and the politics of the question of whether or not Trumpism is best understood as fascism that is revealing key fault lines on the Left.
In Part I, I clarify the stakes in this debate, provide an overview of the key arguments that have been advanced by different camps, and outline why I believe that Trumpism does indeed represent a specifically American, specifically 21st-century version of fascism. 2/
In Part II, I focus on how prominent leftwing intellectuals are allowing their singular, disdain-driven focus on (neo-) liberalism to completely distort their perspective on the Right. 7/
Prominent leftwing intellectuals are allowing their singular, disdain-driven focus on (neo-) liberalism to completely distort their perspective on the Right.
A specific camp of leftwing intellectual Skeptics is stubbornly refusing to engage seriously with the fascism argument and the radicalizing tendencies on the Right. Their overriding concern is a political struggle against what they believe is the real enemy: The (neo-) liberal elites.
I do not make these accusations lightly. The piece is almost 5,500 words long, with lots and lots of concrete examples. Add Part I, and I wrote about 11,500 words on the fascism question in the past three days. Happy holiday weekend reading!
Part I of my deep dive into the fascism debate is out:
Over 6,000 words on the stakes, the scholarship, the key arguments, and the politics of the question of whether or not Trumpism is best understood as fascism - and why the Skeptics are so weirdly adamant it must not be.
The fascism debate rages on: Here is why it matters, what the main contentions are, and why the arguments of the Skeptics are increasingly untethered from what is happening on the Right.
If Trump is to be believed, in order to restore this declining nation to former glory, to Make it Great Again, it has as to be “purified” – the enemies have to be purged. Trump has repeatedly promised a deportation operation of unprecedented scale, targeting non-white people. 9/
Trump is not using violence systematically? Well, all strands of the Right – Republican elected officials, the media machine, the reactionary intellectual sphere, the conservative base – are openly and aggressively embracing rightwing vigilante violence. 16/
The fascism debate rages on: Here is why it matters, what the main contentions are, and why the arguments of the Skeptics are increasingly untethered from what is happening on the Right.
Great work lately (probably always, but I picked up your newsletter lately). Added it to recommended newsletters for Minimum Competence -- hope to send a few discerning readers your way.
I joined The Big Picture for a Q&A about “Project 2025”: What it is, the extreme worldview of the reactionaries behind it, what it would do to America, and why it provides such a crucial insight into the state of the Right today.
I wrote this exactly a year ago, and today – as Texas Gov. Abbott has pardoned convicted killer Daniel Perry – is, sadly, a good day to repost it: The open embrace of violence plays a key role in the broader rightwing mobilization against democracy.
All strands of the Right – Republican elected officials, the media machine, the reactionary intellectual sphere, the conservative base – are openly and aggressively embracing rightwing vigilante violence. 3/
But the celebration of Kyle Rittenhouse and the pardoning of Daniel Perry still mark a key moment, capturing the significant radicalization of rightwing politics in the past few years, after the election of the first Black president and again since the anti-racist protests of 2020. 6/
Weekend reading: I wrote about how mainstream commentators constantly raise the specter of 1968 to denounce the student protests - willfully ignoring the long pattern of leftwing student movements acting as an indispensable corrective.
Commentators look for the most extreme voices and insist they define the whole movement. They often do this while conceding that the vast majority of students are genuine in their concern for the lives of innocent civilians. Why not foreground this reality about the protests? 2/
But we must grapple with the role left-coded student protest movements have consistently played in recent U.S. history: As a corrective, reminding the nation that it was failing to live up to its own promises and aspirations.
Pundits constantly invoke the upheavals of 1968 as a warning against student radicalism.
But the history of “1968” is better understood as the story of a generation that objected to a vast gulf between democratic promises and discriminatory realities.
If we zoom in on the “West,” it was the frustration over the gap between the promise of liberal democracy and the reality of a society and political system that certainly was quite democratic for some groups and something else entirely for others. 7/
A global superpower that was presenting itself on the world stage as the oldest democracy in existence and a beacon of freedom for people everywhere was, in reality, a society in which the individual’s status was significantly determined by race, gender, religion, or wealth. 9/
Student protest movements have historically functioned as an indispensable corrective for America and the West. That is the legacy of 1968 we should be talking about.
In recent U.S. history, student protest movements have consistently functioned as a necessary corrective: A thorn in the side of elites who were too blind, too complacent, or too complicit to see that America was failing to live up to its own promises and aspirations, at home and abroad. 9/
Students have the time and resources to think critically about society and creatively about potential ways to make the world a better place – and they are not yet too jaded or too exhausted to believe this might actually happen: We could really make the world a better place. 12/
Student protest movements have historically functioned as an indispensable corrective for America and the West. That is the legacy of 1968 we should be talking about.
@tzimmer_history now if only they weren't protesting on behalf of a nation that rapes and kills gays. A people who fought on the nazi's side in ww2 and 100% raped to death The teenage Israli's they kidnapped. honestly you kids these days are just so fucking gullible. did you never think maybe there was a REASON palestine was punched down at? no, you just bought some talking points like the fucking idiots you all are.
@tzimmer_history Thank you Thomas.
I’m a #GenXers & daughter of working class “#babyboomer Hippies”.
We’re all born & raised in Ann Arbor, MI…my parents were HUGELY involved in the ‘68 #protests & went on to start our cities Ecology Center.
But current protests really get under their skin.
Mom & I argue over it.
I’ve been unable to voice effectively my concerns.
Your piece lays it all out there.
Hopefully after she reads this piece, we can reach a clearer understanding of this issue.
What really stands out about this interview with New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn is this pervasive sense among centrist elites that by the summer of 2020, “woke” radicalism had been allowed to advance too far - and people like Kahn see it as their mission to stem the tide. 1/
Centrist elites seem convinced that those young radicals must be prevented from toppling an order of, as they see it, reason, stability, and quite enough progress (no more!) by any means necessary.
Even if that entails legitimizing and making common cause with the Far-Right. /end
This crackdown on college protests and the support it is receiving from mainstream elites is about Israel and Gaza – but not just about Israel and Gaza. It is also fueled by a pervasive sense that things have gone too far, that these “woke” radicals urgently need to be reined in.
Mainstream elites are adopting a reactionary tale about the “leftist” indoctrination of America’s youth that verges on the conspiratorial and is destined to give the Right a major boost.
I wrote about what George Packer gets so wrong about the university, critical theory, and the legacy of the 1960s student protests – and what to make of the fact that he is propagating the conspiratorial idea that leftwing radicals have successfully indoctrinated generations of kids. 2/
The story George Packer presents in The Atlantic is very much in line with what Christopher Rufo has been propagating. A straight line of evil ideas from the “cultural Marxism” of Critical Theory (Marcuse!) to the protests of 2020 – in Packer’s telling: to Columbia 2024. 8/
Mainstream elites are adopting a reactionary tale about the “leftist” indoctrination of America’s youth that verges on the conspiratorial and is destined to give the Right a major boost.
I wrote about George Packer’s grand accusation of a direct line of leftwing indoctrination from 1968 to today. His argument doesn’t hold up to the least bit of scrutiny - but it provides a window into the elite anxieties that are driving so much of mainstream politics in America.
Packer’s idea of a postwar university devoted to the “disinterested pursuit of truth” that was destroyed by leftwing radicals is brutally ahistorical nonsense.
A much more plausible perspective worth unpacking: The 60s rebels’ argument that “Columbia exists within American society.”